INVENTORY STAGING

A mobile application used for store inventory and fulfillment operations

Designed at Manhattan Associates (2015)

Among other existing operations like receiving, picking and cycle counting, the product team decided to add an additional feature to this application to enable "Staging" of inventory. Especially for customer pick-up orders, there is a need for organized staging of items that allows store associates to locate the orders as quickly as possible, at the time of fulfillment. This new feature allows users to execute that task efficiently.

Project Details

Research

Current Market Needs

Weather a boutique or a large retail store, when a customer walks in to pick up their online order in store, they come with the expectation of skipping the wait at checkout lines. Even more the reason for store associates to know where exactly the customers' order is located and fulfill the order quickly and accurately. Also, with multiple store associates involved in the process of picking, staging and pick-up of an order, it is important for the system to enable efficient fulfillment.

My Role

UX/UI direction

I lead the UX/UI design on this project and collaborated with business analysts to design the staging workflow to be user friendly. I created and presented multiple user flows so they can be validated for efficiency and then chose the most suitable one to execute this feature. I also created multiple wireframes and screen designs so developers could reference them from the use case documentation. This feature particularly had extremely stringent timeline and hence the collaboration between UX, BA and Development teams had to be very strong. We successfully implemented the staging workflow within the stipulated time and the improvements made within this feature from an interaction standpoint, were very well received by project management team and customers.

Application Characteristics

Feature design considerations

— Designed for handheld devices (iPod and iPhone)
— Guided workflow for ease of use for temporary associates (common case scenario)
— Progressive disclosure of information while staging items of an order, further help simplify the process
— Flexibility to print multiple identification slips per order at any time in the workflow and also add multiple locations
— Location scan and value input flexibility in case locations are not barcoded
— Processing of one order at a time

"This is exactly what we require to stage our products at Toys "R" Us."

— Store Supervisor, Toys "R" Us

Project Highlight

At first, the scope of this project was undermined to be a very small enhancement. The rigorous exercise of userflows I carried out, helped the Business Analyst to think each step through and define all exception flows right at the beginning. User flows were the main drivers for this project and made it possible for us to achieve our timeline goals. Since this project, I always emphasize the importance of process/userflows as an integral step in the early stages of design.

Design Documentation

Following are snippets of design documentation I produced to communicate within and across teams.